The Renku Sessions: Cotton Clouds – Week 5

Welcome to the current renku session. I am John Stevenson and I’ll be your guide for a twenty verse, nijûin renku.

We will be using an on-line list of season words and phrases (kigo) for those verses that require a seasonal reference:  https://yths.org/season-word-list/

Here is my short list of verse 5 offerings:

unseen
tree frogs
in the moonlight

Debbie Feller

wild ducks
navigating across
a moonlit sky

Richard Straw

the glint of the moon
off the blade of
honed skates

Michael Henry Lee

as the moon
travels west
against a stiff north wind

Michael Henry Lee

whale watching
beneath
the winter moon

Tracy Davidson

father’s fly swatter
almost swats
the moon

Tracy Davidson

moonglow
softening
the summer thistle

Sharon Ferrante

moonlight
and mosquitoes
under the net

Lorraine Haig

moonlight
spirals around
the wind chimes

Carol Jones

weeding
with the day moon
strapped to his back

Laurie Greer

moonrise
to a drumroll
of thunder

Margaret Anderson

the hermit crab’s
new shell glistens
in the moonlight

Sally Biggar

a crescent moon
clinging to the mesh
with the moths

Orense Nicod

my mother
stares at the winter moon
alone

Diana Ming Jeong

a day moon
rests upon
the beach umbrella

Wendy C. Bialek

a winter moon
keeps the snowman
company

Debbie Scheving

It probably won’t do much good to repeat it every week. I’ll just say that verses that are written in the style of haiku will not be selected. Renku verses are not haiku. They do not feature internal juxtaposition of disjunctive images. They do not feature grammatical breaks. Verses that start with a prepositional phrase (a very widely used mechanism in English-language haiku) almost always follow it with a grammatical / syntactical break.

Here is my choice for the fifth verse:

the hermit crab’s
new shell glistens
in the moonlight

Sally Biggar

The style of linking, in this instance, involves contrast. The previous verse presents the comfort of communal activity – singing literally and renku by implication. The new verse begins a new and different tonal section of this renku. It does so with the comfort of an individual (a crab!) who has found a more commodious shell. An individual, and a crab at that, could be a good set up for our first love verse.

So, here is what we have, so far:

Cotton Clouds (working title)

a pinto colt
canters the meadow
cotton clouds

John Stevenson

muddied boots
on the welcome mat

Jennifer Sutherland

a bounty
of tulips spilling
over the vase

Eavonka Ettinger

the comfort of song
sung together

Anne Fox

the hermit crab’s
new shell glistens
in the moonlight

Sally Biggar

This week, we will be working on the sixth verse. This will be two lines. It will be a summer verse, so it must contain a summer word or phrase from our list of season words. It is the first of a pair of love verses. Here are some other considerations:

• Love verses, in renku, are about love between adult human beings. It would be best if this first of a pair depicted relatively early stages of a relationship, from early attraction through early marriage. This will leave room for the next verse to focus on a later stage.
• It’s not a requirement but an urban setting might go well in this verse.
• We are now in the middle section (the ha), where anything goes and very broad strokes can be taken.

Please enter a maximum of five verse-six offers. The deadline for submission will be midnight, eastern US time on Monday, May 26.

Looking forward to your first love verses~

John

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